Don't Get Clever With Me, Son...

The only thing that will displace an audience’s prejudiced image of you is your humanity.

I’ve hosted many open mics in my time, a rough estimate based on the number of years I did it every week would number about 750. Add all of the other events I hosted and it probably hovers around the 1000 figure. If we go back to the figure I worked out for Poetry Unplugged on its own, we could break it down into 25 spots per night and that would number about 18,750 floor spots that I’ve introduced and watched as part of my old hosting duties at the Poetry Cafe. So, if there were discernible patterns of behaviour or artistic trends, I was sure to notice them.

One trend that I noticed a lot, but have only had a bit of an aha moment about recently, is the working class poet with a need to demonstrate how intelligent they are. Noticing this trend made me remember all of the times that I did it myself. I’m mentioning this not because I want to belittle those poets but because musing upon it brought me a moment of insight about the expectations and assumptions of the poet compared to those of the audience.

My first open mic slots, back in the mid-late 90s, took place after a day's manual labour. Gardening and performance poetry came together surprisingly well. Not only did the early finish of around 4pm allow me to get home to scrub up and catch the train into London to sign up on the list of performers -- the physical nature of the work itself allowed me to mumble lines to myself for composition and rehearsal. If there was a downside it was that of other people viewing and treating me like a simpleton on a daily basis and the need that arose within me to constantly prove that was not the case. How could this not bleed into my performances and readings?

I didn’t recognise this at the time, nor did I recognise how I connected more with my audiences when I found other approaches. I only cottoned on to this many years later while watching another working class man read a poem that would have been incomprehensible to an audience member of any intellectual bent. Not only this but the style of delivery had something about it that came across as very self-satisfied, looking down at an audience that were clearly unable to rise to the rarified intellectual heights that the poem existed within. But, to paraphrase the early work of Michael Franti, there was a loneliness on display at this moment. Not the loneliness of being misunderstood, but the loneliness of not allowing oneself to be understood. What appeared as a kind of arrogance, like most arrogance, came from a place of defensiveness and hurt.

The problem is that, when a working class person shows themselves to be erudite and loquacious, it will often still be interpreted by the cultured classes as a vulgar pastiche of intelligence. I blow hot and cold about Russell Brand, but the way in which his speech is often lampooned betrays this kind of assumption. For a working class poet, no demonstration of intelligence would ever displace the image of the simpleton that the middle or upper class audience might form of them. If anything it will make them even more of an object of derision.

For me, the thing that is so tragic about this kind of performance is all the effort that ends up being for naught. It is just as obsessed with the perception of the audience as a performance that panders to them. If you aren’t bothered about the audience then why bother reading to them in the first place? Why not listen to the sound of your own voice within the confines of your own room? Another motivation might be to simply make a room full of privileged people feel uncomfortable, which is understandable enough, but again, is the need to constantly get a rise from them another form of the need for validation? There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to displace the prejudice that some audience members might have towards you but if you do want to, a demonstration of your intelligence won’t cut it. The only thing that will displace an audience’s prejudiced image of you, and this could apply to so many more groups than the working class, is your humanity.

There was a poem I wrote that probably did more to launch my old career in live poetry than anything I wrote before or after. If you know the slightest thing about me then you probably know the poem. It's the one about the Greasy Spoon Cafe. The late, great, Roddy Lumsden referred to it as my "Get out of jail free poem". He was right in more ways than one. It was always handy when I was dying on my arse onstage but it also did a lot to get me out of the kind of daily grind that the poem spoke about.

The thing people might not know is that I wrote another poem about the Cafe before that one, a poem that was more angsty and, you guessed it, trying to sound clever. It took the feedback of two very special friends, Mark Warren and Nicci Barry, who pointed out that I actually loved Greasy Spoon Cafes and I should write another poem from that place of love instead. I don't think it's an understatement to say that their advice changed the course of my life. I was also listening to Tom Waits's Nighthawks at the Diner at the time and the warm humanity that imbued that record, especially on the track Eggs and Sausage, helped me to find the right tone.

The Cafe poem is dated as hell now, and a bit too testosterone heavy for me to pull off today. But the thing about it that connected with all audiences was the way in which it humanised the scary, gruff, disaffected men and women (but mainly men, to be honest) that frequented these establishments.

I still fall into the trap of writing poems that overplay my intelligence, or have to prove I'm not a simpleton whenever I find myself in front of a cultured audience. I sometimes wish I'd spent less time trying to branch out into one person shows when I really should have written another “get out of jail free poem”. That probably would have bought me another decade on the live poetry gravy train. I guess I still could, but if I do rise to that task, I won't nail it by merit of my intellect. It will always be a case of me taking an honest, unflinching look at my own humanity.

The Last Voiceover

So, after lots of consideration, I have decided that I'm going to stop recording voiceovers for these posts. The basic reason is that I have very little time and space to record things with my otherwise blissful familial living arrangements. I will, however, keep recording the podcast during the few hours each week when I am able to record. This will be a way for me to record versions of the best posts and make them accessible to people who want to listen instead. For now, the substack android app has a pretty good read aloud function and I'm hoping that screen reader software will suffice for those that need to listen for accessibility reasons. This was a hard decision to make but ultimately I just want to write and publish without being compromised by the technical requirements inherent in creating a personal voiceover.

Thanks for reading this,

Niall